This is brutally honest advice for men to win in their 20s. I made my first million at 26, I crossed 100 million in net worth at age 31, and this is my roadmap for things that I learned along the way. I'd like to normalize a six-day-a-week, 12-hour-per-day work week for men between 16 and 28. And despite all the self-worth voodoo that social media and society will tell you, you are valued based on your utility.
And when you're young, you have none. But you have a lot of energy. And so trade that energy for experience points and become useful. The first rule of entrepreneurship, according to Alex, is use what you've got. And the reason I like that is because many people always don't start things because they don't have the capital, they don't have the connections, they don't have the whatever insert insecurity or projection of blame and power they want to put on.
But the first rule is you use what you have. And so it's about... Resourcefulness, not resources.
And so if you have energy, you use the resource you have, you use what you've got to trade to develop experience, to develop proof that you can get good at a skill. And you only get good at the skill by not being good at a skill and repeating it and then failing at each time and then making incremental improvements which take many many repetitions until you actually get good. And this may be a little controversial but I'm not here to be nice to you. I'm trying to be kind which might mean that it hurts a little bit.
So let's make this practical. If you have less than $100,000 in savings and you would like to have $100,000 or more in savings, these are the things that I would recommend doing. And that means that you have to check out your ego. Your ego is gone for this. You don't care what other people think because they're not going to be there in 10 years.
Because you have a whole new group of friends that are way fucking better and cooler. So one, stop eating out. Discount groceries only. That's if you're super poor. If, here's my caveat, if you know how to make money, you already have a base level of skills, then...
Eating Chipotle and whatever, whatever you can, door dash it in so that you can keep working. The moment I realized I could make $500 every 30 minutes by selling, I was like, oh, I'm never buying, I'm never cooking food or grocery shopping ever again. Anything that was less than $500 an hour was now immediately outsourced, right? But this advice is for people who are super broke, okay?
So if you don't have the skill set yet at all, and you're struggling to just get things going, Then you need to be completely on the defensive so that you can have enough money so that you can start taking bets. Because the only way that you're going to get ahead is that you have to make bets. You've got to make bets on education. You've got to make bets on opportunities.
You've got to make bets on inventory. You've got to make bets on software. You want to start a Shopify store. You want to start a school community. You want to start something.
It's still going to cost some money, right? You might have to buy a camera. You have to buy some software that helps you edit videos.
Like, there's some expenses, all right? And so having a big stockpile allows you to be patient. The more money you have, the longer out you can think because you don't have to worry about tomorrow. You know that next month and the month after and the month after taking care of it because even if you made no money, you've got enough. That's how you can start thinking long-term.
People are like, think long-term, think long-term. But unless if you have payroll or you've got rent or you've got groceries to pay, you can't think long-term because you're in survival mode. And so I'm trying to get survival to be as low as humanly possible for you so that you can get into thrive mode, but it's all relative.
If you make 40 grand a month and spend 40 grand a month, you're going to be in the same survival mode. But if you make 40 grand a month and spend 4, you're going to have every month, you make 10 months worth of income. And so in 2 months, you've got 20 months saved up. You're good. And then you can get super aggressive with that other 36 and start really betting to double down.
Alright, so here's the very broke 5, 6 things that you can do to immediately spend way less. 1. Stop eating out. Discount groceries only. 2. Stop buying new clothes. Go to Godwill only.
Three, only attend free friend events. All right, so think of what I just said. Think about all the events that friends will tell you to come to.
Weddings, bachelor parties, birthdays, just nights out because it's thirsty Thursday, whatever. Only attend free friend events. And if they don't support your goals, they are not your friends. Think about that. If I said, hey, I've got this goal, and I said, hey, there's this human being, and he wants to get you to not have the goal.
Would you describe him as a friend or an enemy? Think about it. Some of the people in your life that you call friends are actually your enemies. You just don't know it.
Now, four, take the rest of the time that you have to, A, apply to jobs that make more than your current job. B, pick up side hustle work. C, learn skills that you can trade for a higher hourly rate than you currently do.
When I say trade, I mean you make more per hour than what your current skills pay you. All right, and then five. Find the hardest worker in the room when you enter that new job or that new place and then double their level of input. So if they knock on 100 doors, you knock on 200. They make 100 dials, you make 200 dials, right?
When I had Jacob, my young neighbor, I gave him this exact advice. And he was expected to, on his team, do 100 dials a day. He did between 300 and 400. And so guess what?
He got better faster. And then once you follow all of those steps, this is what you need to do next. Wait 36 months.
And this is what I mean by patient with your outputs, impatient with your inputs. And the crazy thing is that you can change your life in one decision. I can get drunk, drive in a car, and change my life forever. Right?
I can happen like that. But it can happen just like that the other way. It's just that the outcome is delayed.
That's the only difference. You can change your life today in this moment by making these decisions and your life path will have veered. You will have changed direction.
Your tree of life will move. It's just that it takes time for that new direction to bear fruit. Whereas you can poison the fruit in a second.
You can kill a tree real fast. You just can't grow one real fast. But it doesn't mean that if a seed's planted and you're watering it, it's not growing.
It just takes a second to get above the surface. I think you can solve a lot of male problems by getting in shape and making money. You'll still have problems. They'll just be smaller and you'll have more resources to handle them. So let's talk about the making money part first.
Fundamentally, in order to make money, you have to provide value to someone, either an employer or customers. But either way, you have utility, which you exchange for money. And so by making that a goal, then it means that you're going to increase your own usefulness. And so somebody who is more useful all of a sudden develops other ancillary skills around that utility that they can use in other parts of their lives.
If you're good at sales, guess what you can do when you're talking to girls? You can use the same conversational skill set. If you are trying to negotiate a purchase for a car or a house or whatever. Like those skills generalize.
They transfer across domains. And so a lot of people think it's like, well, when would I ever be a salesperson or when would I ever be an outbound? Like it doesn't matter. It's not about that thing. The thing is it's like real-life skills actually do generalize.
Like this isn't elementary school or middle school when you're learning calculus or algebra or whatever and thinking like, what am I going to use this in real life? One, it is real life right now. Two.
These skills do get used across domains. Of all of my friends who are sense millionaires and billionaires, to a person, they started in what I would consider a high-volume sales environment. So that's either door knocking, cold calling, or some sort of in-person business where they had many, many, many conversations with strangers on a daily basis. And I'm talking not like a month or six months. I'm talking like...
Three, five years where no one knew their name. They were just some faceless representative that stood there at the door, saw people, sold memberships, sold insurance, sold solar, sold whatever. And the thing is, is like skill development happens through volume and feedback loops.
So it's the number of repetitions you have times the amount of improvement between repetitions. Brute forcing the amount of volume definitely will help if you can give yourself feedback. I've seen people say, hey.
I've actually made 100 pieces of content. Now, this is like 1% of people because most people do nothing. But of the 1% of people who say, okay, I post it every day for a year, the thing is they didn't do the most important part, which is you don't just make a video and post it just every day like, make a video, post it, make a video, post it. You have to look at what you did and what you could do better. Fundamentally, that is the cornerstone of feedback.
And so you look at the top 10 videos you made over the last month and you say, okay, how do I do more of that and how do I do less of the bottom 10%? And you just pick one thing that you did well there, and you try and do it in every video going forward. And that develops a checklist of things to do so that you develop a skill. And so speaking from my own experience, the first sales conversation I ever had, first off, I had zero sales training.
No one was like, hey, this is the script. This is how you go over. They were like, hey, here's a new lady. Go sign her up. And so I was like, okay.
And I didn't even know this was a sale. I didn't know the term sales. I just, he said, go sign her up. And I said. okay.
And so I walked over and I, and she was like, Hey, you know, I want to know more about the gym. And I said, well, what do you want to know? And she was like, well, I mean like, how much is it? And I was like, oh, it's, uh, whatever, 150 bucks a month. And she was like, okay.
And I was like, you want to sign up? And she said, I left my credit card at home. And I was like, okay. And she was like, I'll be back with the credit card. And I was like, cool.
And so I walked out and, uh, it was like two minutes. Right. And I walked out And the owner, Sam, was there with a few of other gym owners. He had brought a few gym owners in. So it was like three or four gym owners there.
And he was like, damn. He was like, that was fast. And I was like, yeah.
He's like, you closed her? And I was like, yeah. And he was like, with a credit card? And I was like, oh, no.
She's going to go get it, and she'll be back. And they just looked at each other and then looked back at me and then just started laughing at me uncontrollably, like couldn't breathe at how dumb what I had just said was. And the thing is, is I had no experience. And I tell that story because... So many people assume that like I walked out of the womb closing deals, you know what I mean?
Like, hey nurse, what are you doing later? You know what I mean? Like, but it wasn't like that, right?
Like I didn't know. I didn't even know the term. And so, you know, over time I just started developing like, okay, well, what do you do? And I watched other people. So I was like, okay, they start with asking them why someone's there.
I asked them about their goals, ask them things that they've done in the past that didn't work. I said like, okay, that seems to work okay. And then when they asked them to buy, Then if they don't want to say yes, they ask them more questions rather than just saying, okay. And so I started to develop at least an understanding of the framework of how sales occurred.
But I still wasn't good, right? And so then I went through like that rocky cutscene period where this is where I'm very grateful for this is that Facebook ads is when I started running them in 2013 were super cheap. And so it actually gave me so many repetitions because not only was I taking 15 to 20 consults a day in person. I was also working leads and so I'm talking to strangers over the phone to set the appointments And so all I got was just names on a list and I would call them set the appointment like who is this again?
You know all of that And then and by the way, if you are local You just say the name pause with a question mark at the beginning like John and then they'll be like, yeah You're like this is Alex. I'd pause and they'd be like they're like I'd be like from Facebook you signed up for a blah blah blah blah blah our thing Yeah, I'm just calling to make sure that you're not a crazy person with the internet and neither am I. I was like, we're actually on the corner of X and Y.
I was like, right next to the 7-Eleven. They're like, yeah, yeah. I'm like, okay, cool.
I just wanted to see what time you want to come by. I was like, we have the sweetest facility in the world. Not really, but it's at least pretty decent for this area.
But we have five out of five coolness. And they were just laughing. They'd be like, I can make it at six. And I'm like, six works.
I was like, do you want a picture of me or just of the address? And they're like, just the address. I'm like, all right, sounds good.
I'll text it to you and I'll see you later today. Right? So that kind of like, notice the like half giggles between each word.
Like it's showing that you're a positive tone person, high energy. And someone's like, man, this guy seems cool. Or this gal seems cool, right? And so they're more likely to show up.
They're more likely. Now, if I maintain that tone, if they give me an objection, I can pivot really easily. If I'm like neutral or like, hi, I saw that you signed up on the internet for our thing. Would you like to come in?
They're like, well, tell me more about it. Like, well, you have no room for messing up. And so I always tried to have more rapport and bring a lot of energy.
And the thing is, if you've seen any of my content, I'm not naturally a high-energy person. I will continue to work, which is different than being up here. And so I developed a lot of things to try and keep myself energized.
And so I had a small trampoline that I would bounce on before and between every sales appointment. It sounds ridiculous, but I'm telling you, it's like $100. If you buy one of those little trampolines and you bounce either between sales calls or between people, like I'd have people coming in as I was still bouncing and I'd be like, I know this is ridiculous. I was like, but try and be in a bad mood on a trampoline. You can't do it.
You can't do it. You can't do it. And I challenge you too. You could be in a bad mood.
If you try jumping around, like you feel like such a child, it's ridiculous. But what would happen is like, I would really, I would also get a little bit exercise. My blood would keep moving, but it's also just like mentally, um, literally bouncing. gave me a lot of energy for these appointments.
And so I say this because I developed all of these things over time. And so if you're starting out, you're not going to be good. That's why you're new.
You have no experience. But there's a difference between, there's a story that, shoot, I can't remember where it is, but there was a foreign kid who had never seen a banana before. And so the adult gave the kid a banana.
And so the banana, so the kid took the banana and then bit right into it. with the skin and everything. And another child was like, you're such an idiot. And then the adult yelled at that child and said, no, he just doesn't know any better.
And there's a very big difference between being dumb and being inexperienced. Right now, you just don't have reps. And so you're going to make a lot of mistakes, like biting into the banana, like for just letting someone walk away, assuming it's a close and they say that they're just going to come back and call you with their credit card. Right, by the way, that never happens. Very rarely. But instead, you want to just peel that banana.
You want to bite into the banana, bite into the orange, all of those mistakes as quickly as possible and not judge yourself for making the mistake and see the mistake as part of the process of being like, that didn't work, that didn't work. And if I develop enough of these doesn't works, then you just kind of walk the minefield and you get to where you're trying to go. And people are like, wow, you're so good at this. And you're like, oh, no, no, I actually just know all the things not to say in a sale.
And then they end up buying. I just avoid all that and then they buy. And to be clear, I think I have...
A similar piece of advice, but for very different reasons, of telling young men in general, or men, to work harder. And it's not because I think it's some sort of, you know, beating your chest, I'm on alpha, whatever thing. It's just that for me, the point of my life is to become the best version of me. And in order to do that, I need to learn, because there's a huge discrepancy between where I am and where I want to go.
And the discrepancy is going to get filled with skills, which means that I need to do repetitions. to acquire failures that I can learn from to get better from. And if I can do more of that in a shorter period of time, I will learn more skills.
And by definition, I will shrink the distance between myself and my ideal self. And so that is pretty much the only thought process I have around this. And I also believe that you need to be patient with outputs and impatient with inputs.
So let me unpack that. Patience in general is figuring out what to do in the meantime. So when someone says, hey, be patient, what they just mean is figure out something else to do in the meantime.
And so if I'm telling you to be patient with outputs, it means that you basically just have to figure out something else to do in the meantime while you wait for outputs to occur. Because you can't output. You can't.
Money doesn't appear. You have to do something and then money happens, right? But the doing something part is the thing that you can control.
The money happening is the part that you don't control that comes afterwards. It's an outcome, right? Right.
And so when I say patient with outputs, that's the first part. The second part is impatient with inputs. And so if being patient is figuring out what to do in the meantime, impatience is doing the thing in the meantime, right?
And so it's the opposite of that. It's the thing you do in the meantime. And so if you want to be impatient with the input, the input is the thing.
That's the action you do. And so by delineating that, if you hear yourself thinking, man, why hasn't this happened yet? You're talking about outputs and that means great if I think that thought I need to do more of this input, right?
And so use your input your action you're doing this the thing you use your hands for as your coping mechanism for your Impatience with outputs. I want to say that one more time whenever you have that feeling that things should be happening faster Use action as your coping mechanism. I used to write this down a lot and say it, which was action alleviates anxiety.
And so when I would have this anxiety about the future of like, why haven't I made it yet? Why are these other people doing better than me? Like, is this not going to work? What if I'm on the wrong path? Action alleviates anxiety.
The only thing I could control with that is that I would work, is that I would get better. And the key point there was that it wasn't just working for work's sake. It was working with the intention to improve. And so You want to do repetitions because by doing things more times you get better at them, typically just by accident.
But if you're deliberate about the point of doing this, when I started working at a gym going from a white-collar job, it wasn't because I wanted to become a trainer for the rest of my life. It was because I wanted to learn the skills. And then I knew that once I learned those skills, if I owned a gym, then I would know how to do the training part as well, and that would be good for me.
And so then when I was a gym owner and when I started and started working at a gym, I wanted to own a big chain of gyms. That was my, that was my whole goal to start with. I wasn't getting into this for one.
Like I never had the goal of only owning just one gym. And so even when I started that gym, the whole point, and I worked all the time because I thought of all the things that I didn't know how to do yet. And so it wasn't about great.
I've made it. I own a gym. It was like, I'm so deprived of where I want to be. I have, I have to fill this gap as fast as I possibly can.
And so that's why I spent so much time on this. And got feedback from as many human beings as I possibly could who were ahead of me. So I want to say this clearly.
Once I started my gym, one, I paid for a mastermind for gym owners before owning a gym. And I did that because I figured, well, why would I start a gym until I learn all the stuff that you guys did wrong? I was like, I'll just learn from all y'all's mistakes.
It sounds like a great deal for me. It almost felt unfair. I was like, yeah, okay.
He said, don't start at one of those locations. He said, have good storefront. He said, make sure that you have... You know, good parking.
I was, ooh, these are all good, you know, good things. They're like, don't go too big. I was like, okay, that's good.
And they're like, make sure your rent's under this per foot. I was like, all right, make sure I got that, right? And so I took all these notes in that I would have just made huge mistakes on the upfront.
Now, once I did start my gym, what a lot of people don't know is that every weekend, I would either be on phone calls or I'd be driving out to other gym owners. And thankfully, because I was so young when I started my business, they were just like, they felt bad for me. And so they would just sit there and I'd be like, hey, why do you do that? Hey, why do you do that? Hey, why do you do that?
And it was like, you know, they'd be like, God, you're such a pain in the ass. But I just wanted to learn, right? But I was always like willing to help them with anything they had.
You know what I mean? I was like, let me show you the stuff that's working well for me. And I would always just share it.
And the thing is, is I would go there and they would say they did something and I'd be like, huh, that's weird. That's different than the other guy. And I like that way better. It didn't mean I'd take everything as fact, but I got a lot of ideas from that and then I would use them.
And if they didn't work, I would just toss them out. And if they did, I kept it. And that's how I quickly. iterated the gym model to become much better than a lot of people's models despite me being younger because I I was able to leverage everyone else's experience as fast as I could and jam it into my own. And so I think like the people who move faster than life learn faster.
And the only way you learn is by changing your behavior with the same conditions, which means that if a person walks in, I say, this is my six-point script. A person who's identical walks in right afterwards. If I've learned something, that script changes.
It means same condition, new behavior. And so if you keep doing the exact same thing every single day, then you may not be learning. And it's a key point. It's good to work hard, but it's good to work hard and smart, which means that the work you do gets better because you tweak things. And so if you're not documenting the process that you have, and I'm not saying you're making content about it, but literally looking back at game footage, looking at the calls you did, looking at the content you did, I do this today.
People ask me like, what are the masterminds you're into? What are the courses you learn from? I have now...
broken apart the learning process that I have that works best for me because I see the biggest gains and improvement haven't come from advice for me for the most part. They came from looking at data, which was, let me look at the last 2,000 ads I made. Let me look at the top 50. Let me look at what these ones have in common.
Let me look at what they don't look like compared to the bottom 50. Okay, these ones have these characteristics, these don't. I'll do more of this and less of that. And then I do another 100 ads and I look at the top 10 again. I say, what do these ones have that these ones don't? And I do that for sales calls, I do that for content, I do that for meetings, I do that for businesses in general when you start zooming out.
And so that process of do a lot of volume, then look at the outcomes that were good, look at the activities that led to those outcomes that are positive, do more of those activities, look at the bottom percentages, look at the things that led to not having that happen, and do less of those. And if you're younger... and this is specific for everyone who's listening to this video, if you're probably sub-30s, sub-28, maybe, right? If you're in your 20s or less, you can probably get away with this, which is that people ahead of you are more willing, believe it or not, to feel like they have status.
So you can give them status by saying, be a mentor. And the thing is, a lot of young guys have a lot of ego, right? Because you're trying to prove yourself, trying to be a man, whatever.
The thing is, is that if you humble yourself, It's not like there's some fucking massive scoreboard where it's like who humbled themselves to whom across the whole US. It doesn't, it's not, it does not exist. It's just within one dynamic, right? And so if you go and say hey, I don't know anything. I'm happy to learn.
If you do that, then a lot of people are like, oh, well he humbled himself. Well, yeah, I'm happy to teach you. And the thing is is they'll give you advice that's worth thousands of dollars, years of your life for free if you just say you're better than I am at this. But the thing is is that the end of the day, none of it matters, but Scoreboard would be the thing that matters in business, right?
And so the only thing that precedes the scoreboard is your learning. I've spent ego points, I've spent dollars, I've spent time, I've spent social capital, I spent every resource that I had to get more learning faster. Because fundamentally the only thing, and I think this is probably one of the biggest gifts my father gave me, is believing that I am the asset I am investing in.
And the cool thing is that you are the permanent hold, right? You can't sell you. Like, you're you until you die.
And so this is the one asset you've got. Because you compound. Skills compound. When you get really good at sales and really good at finance, guess what? You can raise a billion dollars.
Because you know how the finance world works, and you know how the sales world works. Right? If you know how to code and market, then guess what?
You can build software and sell it to gazillions of people, because you have the product and the acquisition. Like... Skills stack disproportionately. If you only know one, you might not be able to make a tenth as much as if you know two.
Now obviously those are big bucketed terms that have many many many skills underneath of them, but fundamentally when you think about it that way you become a weapon. So let's tackle the second part. I said you can solve a lot of male problems by getting in shape and making money.
And so let's talk about the getting in shape side. So you can avoid tons of problems in life by doing one thing, going to bed on time. And so instead of setting alarms to wake up, set alarms to go to sleep on time. It's hard to wake up late when you go to bed at 9. Right? And so the thing is is that that one simple behavior actually can eliminate a lot of the things that derail men, especially young men.
And so Charlie Munger talks about this a lot, which is like, all I'd want to do is find out where I'm gonna die and never go there. The whole point is he thought so much more about avoiding stupidity than trying to be intelligent. It's kind of like The stupidities are very easy to identify, the intelligence is hard. But if you avoid all stupidity, you just become intelligent by default.
And so if you define intelligence the way I do, which is rate of learning, so how quickly you pick things up, that is intelligence. If you can avoid all of these things that... make you look like an idiot, right? Then you become more intelligent. And so let's talk about this from the getting in shape perspective.
Show me a situation where you have two groups of men, one group of men that is really out of shape and fat, and another group of men that's really in shape that are going to outperform one another. And this is generalized. You have to take random sampling of the population, a bunch of in shape guys, a bunch of overweight guys, who is going to do better at any task over and over again. If we pick 10 tasks that are completely different, the in-shape guys are going to do better than the out-of-shape guys.
Period. They're going to have more energy. They're going to be more focused.
If it's anything interrelations-based, those guys are going to close higher percentages. If you're better looking, you will close more. If you're better looking, you get paid more.
If you're better looking, you get more promoted. If you're better looking, you do better in content. Period.
Fight me. And so the thing is, if you have this one thing that affects every way that people see you and the only thing you have to do is control what you put into your mouth then don't you think it's worth developing that most basic skill of discipline at this point in your life. The thing is that you want to get in shape young because if you're not in shape guess whose fault that is.
So get in shape now. The thing is it cost time not money and right now you've got time and not money and time only becomes more expensive As you age. So buy it now while time costs you the least and you have the fewest responsibilities. It'll help you no matter what life path you choose. The thing that no one recognizes is that drinking costs you two days.
The day you drink and the day you recover. And sometimes the weeks afterwards for the stupid thing you did while you were drunk that everyone else saw. It reminds me of this quote from Muhammad Alex and I asked my team to pull it up because I think it's so good. Also because he was the greatest of all time and just a cool dude. What's the...
the central part of your training is it running is it sparring or central part is dodging the nightclubs and the parties and the girls you want the truth and being in the bed by yourself nine o'clock at night If you can get by that, you'll make it. That's the truth. I'll tell you the truth.
You talk all that running and hitting the bags and jogging and fighting when you want. Dodging ladies is the main thing. Especially when you're pretty like me.
And I'll speak to myself personally. When I had my intense periods of work, I would take off for a long, long time. So the longest that I took off was two years while I was scaling gym lunch from... You know the 20 months we went from zero to four and a half million a month 4.4 to be technical.
I didn't drink that whole period and once things settled out I was like, all right I'm willing to drink again and right now acquisition.com is scaling like crazy And so Layla and I both said let's just stop drinking for the foreseeable then same thing now So that was when I was in my 20s This is now when I'm in my 30s and I'll probably continue this until I feel like I'm at a place where things feel chill again And then like maybe I'll partake again. But the thing is is like if you're hungry Argue me the opposite, which is me drinking more will make it more likely for me to hit my goals. I think you'd have a tough time making that argument. And so right now, everything's compounding is amplified, right? The stuff you do now amplifies throughout your career and your life.
And so I would want to stack as many advantages as I can to my favorite, which is like, I'm going to go to sleep on time. I'm going to not drink, right? I'm going to get in shape, right? I'm going to do as many repetitions as I can. I'm going to humble myself.
with people who are more experienced than I am. Even if I think I'm smarter than them, they still know more. And there's a big difference, and this is what I think is really tough for younger guys, is that your brain at 25 to, you know, like 25-ish, 25 to 30, is like peak processing power. But I'm way fucking smarter now than I was then because I've still learned more.
And that's the thing is that you may be smarter than someone in sheer processing power, but they still might know more than you. And so you can't live their life and especially if somebody is further ahead then they it still means that they have knowledge that you don't and so Listen humbling yourself to somebody even if you think you are smarter will teach you more because again argue the opposite I will learn nothing from no one. How does that help you?
It helps if your ego feel good But at some point your ego is gonna have to rectify its good feeling with reality, which is that you're broke as shit and no one cares. And so I would rather humble myself rather than have the world humble me. This is a Bible quote that I just really like a lot. It's from Matthew 23, 12. He said, those who are humble will be exalted, and whoever exalts himself will be humbled. I actually told that to one of our team the other day, because I felt like his ego was getting a little bit bigger than it probably should have been.
And I said, listen, man, I was like, if you want to get humbled, keep doing what you're doing. I was like, but if you want people to talk you up, I was like, humble yourself, let your work work for you, and then everyone else will exalt you. And so I think most men want to be respected. They don't have respect, and so they compensate by exalting themselves because it makes them feel better in the short term, but you look like an idiot in the long term. And think about it like this, like, for some reason, I don't know why we're wired this way, but we say nice things about ourselves and we feel good, but everyone else feels bad, right?
Everyone else says nice things about you. It doesn't make them feel bad to say it, but it makes you feel good. Think about those people in your life who always like talk themselves up. It's like, what do you see?
You're like, this guy's so insecure. It's obvious. And you look that way. You don't feel that way, but you look that way.
And some of the things that you develop as you get older is the separation between how I look and how I feel. Which is like, oh, even though this feels good, I look dumb doing this. Your feelings can lie to you in terms of how well this behavior is serving you. with your goals in the long term.
And while we're talking about your friends exalting you and your friends saying you're cool, how much do their opinions of you really matter? Because now this is going to take a completely different direction than you expected, which is you being humble is a description that other people would give to you, but it relies on you caring a lot of what they think, which is a double-edged sword. And the younger you are, actually at all points, it hurts you. It's kind of like the stock market. One person, two person, one day or two days in the stock market, it's just about sentiment.
But how big the stock goes over a decade is about how good the intrinsic stock is. And so if a few people say you're an asshole, no big deal. If everyone says you're an asshole, probably a problem, right?
And so it's understanding the nuance between that. But your friend group has a disproportionate sway over your behavior. And so your reference group is one of the number one correlations with how big your life gets. Or rather... The goals you achieve.
Now they've done the studies in terms of finance because it's easy to quantify, but your reference, you have the five people you compare yourself to, not necessarily spend the most time with, but compare yourself to, are the ones that determine your future. And so sometimes you have to like your goals more than you like your friends. And every person who wants to do something in their life or has done something with their lives is going through the exact same chapter that you're going through right now.
And it's the lonely chapter. It's the chapter where you don't fit in with your old friends, but you don't have the achievements yet to fit in with a new group of friends. And you're doing all the stuff, right? The fruit tutorials, you're watching these videos, and you're reading everything you can get your hands on. And you're trying to set up whatever your podcast is or your content thing, right?
And you're going through it and you're thinking to yourself, like, is this even worth it? Because you're not seeing any signs of success. But the sign of success is the hate that you get along the way.
It is the leading indicator. And what you can't do is bend the knee to their hate and try and fit back in and conform because it's comfortable and it's warm. It's like the scene in The Matrix when Trinity opens the door, the very beginning in the first Matrix, when Neo's about to take the red pill and he wants to get out of the car. And Trinity says, you've been down that road, Neo. You know that road.
And you know exactly where it ends. And I know that's not where you want to be. And then he closes the door. And he gets back in and they go to go take the red pill. So right now.
This moment that you're going through is Trinity opening the door and saying, you could go back, you could go party, you could go to the nightclubs, you could say that this was just a hobby, you could downplay what you're doing, like, I'm just trying it out, oh yeah, I'm not really that into it, it's just like, just something I found, right? But then, as you're saying, you feel like a fake because you're lying to yourself, you're lying to them about what your real intentions are. And in that moment, when you're trying to think about having that conversation, you'll remember exactly why you left, why it is that road, and you know exactly where it ends, and that's not where you want to be.
And the thing is that your goals will stick with you longer than these relationships. Your goals will serve you more than these relationships. And this is the stuff that no one will tell you.
I can tell you personally, I don't talk to... I talk to one friend that I have from middle school and high school, right? I talk to... One person, two people from college, and it's not like we talk all the time. I talk to him every six months or so.
And so I say this because although these relationships feel like they're incredibly important in your life right now, they will disappear. The majority of these of these friendships are based on convenience. You're only friends with them because they lived in your dorm, they lived in your neighborhood, they went into English class with you. But as soon as your conditions change, you change where you're at, many of them will fade away because you'll develop new skills.
You'll develop new contacts. You'll meet new people who are upskilled from them. And then you'll compare them to compare it to these people. And you'll be like, man, these are better friends. These are people who are more aligned with my goals.
They're trying to grow. When I want to work all day Saturday, they're like, cool, I'll work with you. Rather than being like, dude, we're going on a pontoon boat. Like, where are you going to be?
And You have to accept that as the price. And the thing is, it's only if you want that. If you want to live a life that is the same as everyone else's, then you can do what everyone else does.
The only issue is when you want to do what everyone else does, but get what none of them have. If you want to be exceptional, by definition, you will be the exception. You will not be normal. You will be unlike the others. And so it makes sense that you would be in the out group.
And it hurts as a human being because you want to be in the in-group. It's part of our DNA. Shame is a real thing. And we don't want to feel that because in the natural world, if you're outside of the group, you have a much lower likelihood of living and procreating. So it's strong in our DNA to be in-group.
But the thing is that you're actually not in-group or out-of-group. You're transitioning. You're between groups.
And so in that lonely chapter, that's where you can do a disproportionate... proportionate amount of work because you have no distractions. So you listen to the podcast, you read the tweets, you watch the videos, you consume the content because you know deep down, I can do more than this.
And you begin to see the person that you could be and realize how far you need to go to get there. But despite how far away it seems, your goals, the best version of you, you look back down the dead end road and you know that's not where you want to be. And so you keep going and realize that there's no turning back. Once you see the promised land, once you see what you could become, you can't go back.
And if you're not sure who your real friends are, one, ask, is it more likely or less likely that I hit my goals with this person in my life? Just think about it. Like, if this person isn't in my life, is it more likely than my goals?
Then remove them. Because it's better to have friends who force you to grow than ones who accept you as you are. Because the biggest risk to your future isn't your future competition or your rivals. It's the distraction that you insist on keeping in your life rather than doing the things you know you should be doing but aren't. Think about it like this.
Imagine a competitor that you'd never want to go against. Focused, persistent, always learning, always improving, relentless, says no to everything but that which makes them stronger. You know what he looks like, you know how he acts, you know who he associates with. Great, that's future you. Now become him.
You have to kill your current self for your new self to have room to grow. And so it's this constant appraisal of your skills and activities and saying, Which of these makes me stronger? Which of these makes it more likely for me to hit my goal?
And I just want to give you that frame because that like that single frame of is this person being in my life make it more likely or less likely to hit my goal? Is this activity or this behavior that I do make it more or less likely to hit my goal? And I consistently just ask that question over and over and over again.
And that is because for me I do love my goals more than I love my friends. Because my goals will be with me long after they are. And so if you think about your relationship with your goals and you put it on the same pedestal or higher than your relationship with your friends, you're going to lose one of the relationships. And the question is, which one is the one that's going to serve you more in the long term?
That's a decision for you. But for me, I can tell you personally, achieving my goals has served me more than any one person has. And because achieving your goals is a generalized thing, it can open all doors to new relationships. And so. you do have to burn sometimes what you have in order to have what you want.
If you want to impress poor people, outspend them. If you want to impress rich people, outwork them. And I can tell you this being in the position that I'm at because I have tons of young men who work for me. And, I mean, they hear all the content that I make and they know that.
And so if you lease a Ferrari for $5,000 a month or whatever, I know you're not rich. And every rich person... isn't impressed by that because we know what it costs. You only impress poor people. And if you do it really early in your career, every rich person's like, man, you should be reinvesting that to get way fucking bigger.
Now, if you're like an aficionado and you want to have lots of cars, then that's like, again, that's different. It depends on the reason you're doing it. It's like, you shouldn't be cooking your own food, unless you love cooking. But if you don't love cooking, then you should outsource that shit as fast as possible so that you can get your time back. It's understanding the context of this, which of course this will be taken out of context.
But hopefully, you watching or listening to this, can at least get it. Layla and I both collectively started buying nicer things. So living in nicer places, having nicer cars. I bought my home, which was a nice house in Austin.
I think it cost me 1.7 million. I bought it in cash and I bought it off one month's paycheck. And so I want to put that in context to like, was it a balling house?
Totally. It was sick. I was super happy to be there.
But where I lived before that cost me 1200 bucks a month. And so you're like, wait, 1.7. Right.
We spend money, but... But by percentage, the amount of money we spend is inconsequential. If you want to buy the toys and you want to buy that stuff, I'd say, sure, understand one.
Whatever you spend, you're taking away from the future. Now, there is always a point you have to balance between consumption and investment. If you never spend anything, you live your entire life and you end up with a big pile of money and you didn't enjoy any moment of that. I don't think that's the way to do it.
But I do think there's a ratio there. And I think that ratio depends on you as an individual. I tend to always over-index on investment because I want to become a really great version of me. And I think that's going to cost money and it's going to cost time.
And I like to be ready for those opportunities because the opportunities get bigger and have more zeros next to them. And there's no masterminds you get to at a certain level. You just do a deal with someone.
And for me to pony up for the deal might be like, hey, you got to write a check for 10 million. I'm like, all right, I got to have that ready for just like on the sidelines waiting for opportunities, right? And so the idea is being on the defensive so that you can be on the offensive.
It's living far below your lifestyle so that you can more heavily invest in the growth of the business. And so your lifestyle is your competitor's opportunity. There's you and other version of you. There's Bizarro you, right? And Bizarro you wants to live this great lifestyle and has the Ferrari and the nicer place and whatever.
But when an opportunity comes along, Bizarro doesn't have any savings because he's trying to show face, right? But the thing is that everyone's trying to show face for hates him anyways because it looks like he's bragging. But also, they know how much he makes relatively.
And they're like, God, he's got to be spending his whole paycheck. He looks irresponsible. There's zero advantage to being accurately judged.
If you are strong, you want to appear weak. You want to have more money than people expect you to have. And so for me, when we did buy the Bentley, which I bought because I got, I'll be honest, I got pressured into it.
They're like, dude, come on. You make all this money. Like.
buy something nice for yourself. And I was like, I guess people buy nice cars. So I bought a car, I bought a Bentley. And I returned it six months later and I lost 20 grand on it.
And I was like, this is just a complete waste of everything. Like, I just don't care at all about this. Because you only need three things to win.
You can write this down. The balls to start, the brains to learn, and the heart to never quit. And the good news is you already have all three. You're just not using them.
Because fundamentally, if you found somebody and they started and they continue to get better and they never stopped, they would win. Just think about it from fundamental basics. Like if I said, okay, think of a person who only did one thing and all they dedicated their entire life to is doing that one thing and getting better and better at that thing.
And they did it for 50 years. Do you think that person would not be incredibly successful? Of course they would be.
Then why aren't you doing it? The problem is it's never been easier to start a business. It's also never been easier to do nothing at all. And this is what I mean by...
Your distractions are the things that are getting in your way, preventing you from doing the things you already know you should be doing but aren't. Right now, if I were to say, hey, go get in shape, what do you need to do? What you want to say is, oh, I'm going to go do some research to find the best program and to find the best diet. But if I just said, no, no, no, you can't look, make a guess. What would you say?
You'd probably be like, well, I need to probably go to the gym, probably do some weights, probably do some cardio, move a little bit. Or I'd say, do you want to stay at the same weight? Do you want to stay at the same cardio pace? Or do you want to move those up over time? You'd probably say, I want to move those up over time.
Okay, and then food wise like do you want probably eat more protein and eat less shit probably like yeah Like well, why don't we just start there most of the things you need to do You already know what to do and you delay doing them by under the guise of having a better plan But the reality is that your plan is always going to change as soon as you get new information And so the point is to start period and learn and it's giving yourself permission to have the humility to Start a role that you know is not going to be your endgame because you just see it as one tile on the painting that's going to become the version of you that you want. It's like, I got to start at this corner. I'm going to paint this corner up because I know that this cornerstone of experience in door-to-door or cold calling or media buying, whatever, is going to be something that I can build my whole career off of. There are maybe trillions of dollars, but at least hundreds of billions of dollars that are being made and dedicated every day to getting you to do nothing.
It's not a fair fight. I want to be clear. It's not a fair fight.
And they're winning. And so I love this from Andy Friselli. He said, personal excellence is the ultimate rebellion. And so I think like, you want to be a fucking rebel?
Be excellent and do it for you. Like you want to stick it to the man now? Just be great. Fundamentally, the point of entertainment is to get someone to pay attention to it.
That's all entertainment does is pay attention to me, right? And so that means that you're not paying attention to the thing that matters more to you in the long term. And so every dollar, every minute of attention you pay to entertainment, whether that's porn, alcohol, going out to clubs, all of social media in general, motivation porn, if you will, all of that is you not doing what you need to do to get to where you want to go. You just have to be able to do things without seeing an immediate reward.
Like if there's one meta skill that overshadows all of this, it's your ability to delay gratification. It's to delay a moment of reward. That's it.
Like that's all you have to do. And in the beginning, you just have to be able to do it long enough that you get one reward. And that reward is typically outsized in its strength. And then that will reinforce you sticking with it. Because the people who do work really, really hard, it's not like they're made of different flesh and blood than you.
It just means that they had a short period at some point where they said, I'm going to shut everything else off and I'm going to go all in on this. And then when they do get that first feedback loop, like, holy shit, I made my first sale. Holy shit, I got my first lead from ads.
Holy shit, I got my first, you know, 100 followers. Whatever, it doesn't matter. Like you have some feedback loop for whatever it is that you're trying to go after.
that then encourages you to do more. And you're like, oh, this could work. And then as soon as that turns on, you can get obsessed with it. If I had you sign a contract right now to guarantee that you'd be a millionaire in 10 years, but you couldn't make any real money between now and then, would you sign it?
Every person I've asked says yes. And so maybe if you are listening to this and you're nodding your head, it's like, okay, from 30, I'm a millionaire? Yeah, that sounds like a great deal.
By the way, that's like.00 whatever, 1%, like no one is. But if that's you, A lot of stuff takes much longer and the problem is that when you're 20 you've only been an adult for like three seconds And so the thing is that three seconds feels like a very long time But I have this belief that older people are more patient not because they're actually more patient It's just because your perception of time speeds up I can be more patient than a five-year-old because for me one year is not 20% of my life. So my perception of time shrinks I might have the same patience as a five-year-old. It's just that more time passes. And so if you are younger, then you have to just understand that.
Your perception of time will speed up, and so you will be able to exhibit patience. You'll keep being able to do something else in the meantime because the meantime will pass faster. And so you have to over-index on it when you're starting.
I mean, I've got guys on my team who are like, hey, what's my next career move? And they're like 30 days into their job. Give it a second.
Like, you still suck. Like you went from suck to proficient. Like you're not great yet.
Calm down. The real world is very different from school, which you've already, if you're watching my stuff, you already kind of have an idea about that. But I want to give you more of the behavioral definition around it. It's that with school, you have very clear directions and a clear outcome with a clear timeline and you get a grade immediately.
So that's kind of like the reward or feedback loop, right? And sometimes it's pop quiz, same day, next day you get the feedback loop. Or even you get, you finish the quiz, you go outside and then you're like, hey, would you answer for six? And you're like, oh fuck, I got it wrong. Or whatever, right?
But the thing is that the world is completely opposite of that. And so the thing is that beginners are paralyzed to make a decision because they assume the real world works like school and only has one right answer. But reality is that there are many right answers with only one wrong answer, which is doing nothing. And that's the answer that most people pick.
So I was talking to Neo Patel, who's a friend of mine, and he just made this big tweet about this, but he and I had a conversation about it earlier. He has two friends, one who's a public CEO, founded a company, took it public. He's got another friend who found a company, took it public, took it back private, and then now only does private deals. The guy who does public and made all of his money public is like, you got to go public. And the other guy who took his company public and it was a big mess and then took it private again is actually richer than the guy who made his company public.
Both those guys are billionaires. And both gave advice. And they had differing advice. And so I don't see it as one is right or wrong.
It's that there are many right paths, but only one thing will prevent you from achieving all of it, which is... the only thing I'm trying to conquer in this video is getting you to not do the one wrong path, which is fear. Fear of not making it work.
Fear of other people's disproval who don't matter anyways. That you aren't cool anymore or because you don't show up to social events or because you don't blow money on stuff that doesn't matter anymore or you're not wearing the brands that they think are cool. Is all of that worth you for the rest of your life having the crushing feeling of mediocrity knowing you could do more? And I say, and I can describe this because I've lived it.
That's why I say it. I'm not saying that that stuff's not going to happen. It absolutely will happen.
And it might even be worse than you imagine. But you will not die. And if you use the frame, does me losing all of these relationships and having more time increase the likelihood that it gets to my goal or decrease the likelihood that it gets to my goal? All of a sudden, when you use the goal frame of the best version of you, all of a sudden it starts to make things a lot clearer. It's like no me going to this bachelorette party does not increase the likelihood that I hit my goals And I'm not saying that you have to make that sacrifice every time But the thing is is you're making a sacrifice either way you're either sacrificing your goals or you're sacrificing that relationship And so some of you guys are like, oh Alex that sounds unbalanced I'm gonna get a couple, you know comments from the fucking online therapists of like I think emotional well-being and mental health is super important Well, first off, the pendulum's swimming back.
No one gives a shit about the soft stuff anymore. Thank fucking God. But at some point, everyone who wants to achieve great things realizes that balance is a myth. And once they realize that, they become someone who achieves great things.
At some point, every person who wants to achieve great things realizes that balance is a myth. And once they realize that, they become someone who achieves great things. And so... There's this whole misnomer, this whole idea. Think about what mediocrity is.
It's about being in the middle. It's the medium. It's being right in the middle, right?
Balance. But anybody who is imbalanced is another way of saying more focused on The one thing will be better at that thing than you. And the question is just whether or not that thing that they choose to be better at will give them more leverage over all that other stuff later.
And so if you work very hard and you create something that's very valuable for society, I promise you, you will be able to find a hotter wife. I promise you, you will have the money that you want. I promise you, you can buy the time that you want to have. You will have all of that at your disposal.
But if you choose the balanced life, there's nothing wrong with that. I just see that there is balance over a lifetime rather than balance every moment of life. And so you might have seasons, like I took basically a year off during the last year of gym launch.
I just didn't really do a lot. So I had more time than anybody and money, right? But I had seasons before that where I didn't take any time off. And so I think if you expand your time horizon for what balance really means, though this is a softer way of explaining it, then I think that that will, you know, make you sleep well at night.
But real talk, I work all the time because I like to do it. And I think that once you get a fast feedback loop with the work that you like that also propels your goals, then you're not going to do anything else. And it's not like I or some of the people that, all right, it's not like the people that you look up to have some sort of Herculean work ethic or discipline that you don't.
They like things that happen to also bring them status. And that means that they went through a small period. where they started doing that thing when they weren't good at it, and it didn't bring them status, but they were able to make it through that bridge until eventually did start working and did bring them status, and then they just kept going. So you just need enough gusto to start and just get through that period, to just get through your friends saying, you suck for a little bit.
And everything you start will not be fun because you'll suck. But getting good is fun. Getting better is fun. And so I get excited a lot of times when I see how bad I am at something that's new because I have enough... generalized reinforcement for learning how to get better at things, that you learn the skill of getting better.
Like that's a meta skill. You learn how to learn. And so just see it as an opportunity to learn how to do anything better.
So if you have a first thing, then that's the first thing that you get better at. And then you'll learn the skill of getting better and you can apply it all over the place. Some of you guys are listening to this and you're like, okay, you know, this is great. I'm feeling awesome.
The thing is, is that people, maybe it's you, are waiting for this perfect moment, but it doesn't come, right? It happens the moment you decide that you're fed up with waiting and decide to take action. And it only becomes the perfect moment when you look back on it, because today it just looks like now.
I had a conversation with a young man yesterday who said, listen, I have demons. And I was like, bro, you don't have fucking demons. I was like, shut up.
And he was like, the thing is, and I was so visceral with my reaction because I used to say that kind of stuff. Because I thought it made me hard. I thought it made me complex. I thought it made me mysterious.
But it's, you don't have demons. You're not self-sabotaged. You don't have mom or dad issues. What you have is a lack of skills in how to behave in a certain condition.
So when you say you have demons, what it really means, if I say, okay, what do you mean by that? Define that. How, what is, define having demons, right? What, I don't, most people say that they don't mean they actually think they have spiritual demons inside of them.
I'm not even going to touch that. What they really mean is that under these conditions I behave a way that is not ideal. And so what that means is you have a skill deficiency.
No shit. You're inexperienced. Of course you have a skill deficiency. You don't have demons. You don't know how to be consistent.
You're not, you don't have, I just can't stay with anybody for a long time. No, it either means you have really high standards, which is fine, and you haven't met that person yet. Or you just don't know how to behave consistently. It's like when I have a sales guy who's like, hey. You know, I'm 30 days into this role and I'm getting kind of bored taking sales calls.
I'm like, oh, your ability to not be able to continue after something gets boring and learn to love the incremental improvements, the hundred or thousand repetitions is the skill discrepancy that you need to overcome. The best salespeople, bad salespeople try and have a couple good days. God salespeople get on hot streaks. Great salespeople never get cold. And so that takes discipline to understand how to consistently get yourself hot.
How to consistently treat every sale the same way you do when you're on fire. Because there is no being on fire. It means you simply behave differently.
It's not like you have magic. You pause differently. You take longer spaces.
You ask the question. Your tonality shifts. And those are skills because you can learn them.
And so this whole thing of like... This is this young man, I'm traumatized. First off, you don't even have a fucking definition of trauma.
All right? Trauma is a permanent change in behavior from an aversive stimulus, meaning something bad happens and forever it changes how you act. Now, if we understand that as the definition of trauma, Is trauma bad?
Well, if I touch a stove and then I never touch a stove again when it's hot, is that trauma bad? It permanently changed my behavior from an aversive stimulus. Is that trauma bad?
Well, it prevented me from burning the house down, from permanently damaging my hand in the future. No, I would say it was good. And so this whole appraisal of your past being tough or you don't understand, bro.
No, and no one cares either. They don't understand, nor do they care. And so all anyone is going to care about is how you act, how you behave, what you do based on a series of conditions. And so you just need to expose yourself to the conditions so that you can get the repetition, so that you can learn how to overcome it.
The thing that determines whether it's good or bad is whether it creates a behavior that's conducive to your goals. And so that means that fundamentally you can have a stimulus like touching the stove that creates a behavior that is conducive to the goal. In that way, trauma was good. So by the way, parents, when you...
Punish a child, the hope is that you traumatize them. Is that you permanently change their behavior from an aversive stimulus. It's just that people don't define words and they just shout them all over the place. They say it's stored in your body, it's energy.
It's like no one even knows what the fuck that means. Show me on someone's body where it's stored. Give me an x-ray. Show me where this...
No, come on. Like you're saying you're storing your emotional trauma from your father and your liver. Like I can just say words and make things up and get people to nod if I say them with conviction. It doesn't make it's true.
And so you may have been fooled because sometimes it's more convenient to say you can cast your power onto this thing that happened that was outside of your control as the reason why you can't be successful because it's easier to say that than to say that I chose not to do anything about it anyways. And again listen you can do whatever you want you can just keep wallowing in that you can keep saying that that's the reason and wherever you point is where your power is right but the only time that you have more power is if you say it's on you period. Because all of those things may have happened and they may have all been terrible.
And what are you going to do about it, right? Because the only part, like no one cares. Like the world doesn't care. You care, which is fine.
But like no one else does. And the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can start doing something about it. And so also, think about this as the equal opposite.
If trauma can create good things, then it also means that good things can create bad behaviors. And so if you win the lottery and then you have all these behaviors that happen afterwards that are negative Then was it good for you? Like we talked about these rich and privileged kids because it creates behaviors that people that actually make it less likely they achieve things later and so just think about what occurred and what behaviors you take as a result and Separate good or bad from it and just think does it make it more likely that I hit my goals It makes life a lot easier and then it stops you from speaking in voodoo And speaking and appealing to mysticism and magic.
Like there's this force around, I have demons. It's like, dude, no. Like you had a girl who cheated on you, okay. Now what does that change about your behavior? I have trust issues.
No, it just means that under these conditions, you are slower to give someone access to your bank account or slower to move in with someone, comma, who cares? And is that a bad thing? And so.
I'll walk you through a three-step framework that has been unbelievably valuable to me. And this is from Dr. logic, evidence, utility. Logic is, what does that mean? So you have demons.
Okay, what does that mean? Define it in terms of behavior. What does that mean?
Okay, got it. Now, how do you know that? Evidence.
So you say, I have demons. We unpack that and it means that for you, you... self-sabotage, which again, define that. Okay, it means that I show up late to meetings after I get into a job after two months of being on time. Okay, so after two months of being on time, you start being late to stuff.
That we translated from I have demons to I self-sabotage to that is the behavior that occurs. Got it. Now, I would say, how do you know that? Now, a lot of times people are like, well, it's happened.
But when you actually look at it, you're like, it happened three times over in my... my last job. Okay.
Is it really a problem as you define it or it happened in those three occurrences? Okay. Got it. So now, you know, now most times people are like, I don't have any data.
And you're like, okay, so then this is basically made up. And when I say made up, I'm not saying it's like you are a liar. I'm just saying that humans work in narratives.
And a lot of times we add narratives, stories to things that don't actually mean anything, but it's convenient and it's fun. And we like talking about it, but it doesn't mean it's true. And so then you learn.
move to the third one, which is, and so what? Utility. Who cares? Why does this matter?
And so then you say, okay, well, this matters because it decreases the likelihood that I will be able to retain future employment. Fine. Then, what do we do about it? And so you can walk through things that you have struggled with in the past with simply saying, let me define this in terms of behavior. What evidence do I have that this is actually true and that I've defined it based on these things?
And who cares? I have demons in the kitchen, all right, just as a completely ridiculous example. Okay, well, in my past, I've had bad things happen, bro. Like what?
Like what occurred? I touched the stove and it burned me. Okay. Great, now we have some. Evidence-wise, how many times did it happen?
One time, okay. And it never happened again in the future, okay. What did that result in?
I don't go into kitchens anymore. Okay, now this is good or bad. When you say who cares, it's in relation to what?
My goals. Does you not going into the kitchen prevent you from achieving your goals? Well, if you want to be a chef, yes. If you want to be an entrepreneur, no. If you want to be a kitchen entrepreneur, probably, right?
And so the question is just who cares? Why does it matter? And so, so much of our time and effort goes into explaining things to people that don't matter at all, that you could literally just move on from and just literally forget about. You could get over that quote trauma by changing the behavior that it changed aversively.
So, in this context or in this condition, I behave this way and it's not conducive to my goals. Great, that's good that you've identified it. Cool, so what do we need to do so that when you're in the condition, how can we increase the likelihood that you do act the way that you want to? And then you start stacking the deck to start shifting the pendulum in your favor.
And you start attacking each of these little problems from skills that you have, whether it's behavior with people or it's skills at work or with a relationship. And you just do it one by one by one. And if you do it over a very long period of time, you get better. I promise you. And I'm saying this as somebody who I struggled with my demons.
You don't understand, bro. Like, I have stuff. Like, okay. But it doesn't help you. And it also doesn't make you look harder.
It just makes you less capable. Losers talk about what happened to them. Winners talk about what they made happen despite it.
Hardship is a reality for losers. To winners, hardship is just your origin story. And like, I promise you, if you can use this frame, like I was texting Layla the other day, like the bigger the monster, the more epic the hero.
It's the story that you're gonna someday tell. When you're 85, you're not gonna want more boring stories, right? The idea is that if you're going through hard shit now, that's the story that you're going to tell.
And if you believe yourself to be the hero that you want to someday become, then the harder it is, you're like, bring it. This is my story. This is the Spider-Man getting bitten. This is him getting beat up by the bullies.
This is the origin story. No one cares about a hero who never had it hard. I bought a lottery ticket years and years and years ago when I was in college because it was like a billion or something like that back then. That was when a billion dollars meant something. I was in college and my girlfriend at the time, I was talking to her and the drawing was that night.
We bought them for fun. We bought one ticket. I wasn't expecting to win.
But it was just a, basically I was buying her for the conversation. And I thought about it as like the drawing got closer and I realized I had this big pain and anxiety because I was like, what if I win? And I had this moment of terror because I realized that if I won that I would never be able to achieve anything that anyone thought was my own.
And that thought terrified me. And thankfully, I didn't win the billion dollars, and I got to make the life that I have. And so I think that, I think Epictetus says this, but it's something to the degree of, what a shame it would be for someone to never encounter hardship because they would never be able to see who they are. And so I think that if you have gone through hardship, or you are going through hardship, this is the opportunity to prove to yourself, not anyone else, that you are who you say you are, and you are made of what you say you are made of.
And you can choose to allow that hardship to make you harder, to make you more resilient, to make you more persistent, to make you more relentless, to make you more driven towards whatever you want to do or whoever you want to be. Or you can allow it to be an ankle weight. You can allow it to be your trauma, right? That is your demon that you're fighting every day.
But the thing is, is like everyone has demons. Everyone has hard shit. And I want to tell you this frame that will hopefully change someone's perspective, which is that your hard stuff may have been harder than other people's hard stuff.
But if I take a human being who has never encountered anything, and then I poke them with a needle, that will be a 10 out of 10 hardship for them. And so I believe personally that humans experience pain the same way. It's why when a man feels disrespected, it hurts just as much as...
Someone else going through another crazy hardship and you know what even if that guy's white a 10 out of 10 pain Still feels like a 10 out of 10 pain now could that pain be less on the absolute scale of worst scenario? Yeah, it could be. But also, who cares? And so my point here is that every single human being on earth has gone through their version of 10 out of 10 pain, which normalizes pain across the spectrum, which then leaves you with the only natural thing you have left, which is what do I do now?
And if you want to design the perfect version of you, the savage competitor, the gladiator at the end of the life that has the scars and the scraggly beard but has been through shit and has done things and has realized their potential. What would you do to maximize the likelihood that you become that savage hero? Would you give them the padded lifestyle? Would you give them the immediate win?
Would you give them the easy life? Probably not. You would probably put you through what you're going through right now to become that person. And so why would you resent the chapter you're in because it's a requirement for becoming who you say you want to be?
Let's say you've... gotten over your little demon thing. And when I say gotten over, you just stop giving it power by saying it now is the reason that you can't be successful.
Awesome. So what do you do now, right? So you got to start figuring things out. And that figured out muscle is probably the most powerful muscle you can build.
It's just saying, oh, I don't know how to do this. I will figure it out. Why? Because I figured out things in the past and I can do it again.
And if that person can do it and they're no smarter than I am, they have two hands and a brain, I can do it too. So the next time that you say you can't figure something out, just set a timer for 20 hours and actually try for 20 hours before you quit. What you'll often realize is it's not hard, you just haven't even tried yet. If you can shrink the time between saying you want to learn something and beginning to try the thing and extend the time before you say, hey, this is hard, then you will be able to accomplish way more than you think.
You can learn most things in 20 hours. The problem is that most people delay the first 20 hours by years. And if you really measured yourself by the amount of action you take, not your desire, not your deservingness, or even your effort, you might actually be embarrassed because what you're looking at is reality. It's about what you do, not what you say you're going to do, how much you want the outcome from what you're doing, how much you think you deserve the thing that's going to happen after you do it, or how hard you try.
Because one, no one cares. Two, reality doesn't care either, because the only thing that matters that you can control is input. And you would be absolutely astonished at what you can accomplish when you give yourself no choice.
Every third time I do a Q&A, I get asked the question, what keeps you going when things were tough? Like, what did you think about? I could come up with something that was really compelling. The honest truth is I just never considered quitting. It was just not on my choice of options at the table.
Because for me, the idea of going back to Baltimore as a failure was so much worse than anything else that I could encounter that it just wasn't even a consideration. And so the only natural option I had was to persist, was to endure, was to continue. And so I think if you use that frame as There have been people who have gone through significantly worse than what I'm going through right now. And for those of you who claim the demon card of like, I've been through shit, then prove it. Was it worse than this?
Great. Then you can prove that it was so hard by being hard now. Across timeframes in history, across countries, across cultures, across age groups, across race, gender, everyone respects the man who works. Because as men, we are always judged by what we can do.
And if you are doing things, then people know that you are contributing. That is how you prove utility. Work ethic is the currency of respect. If you want to earn respect, you earn it through work.
And sometimes that's working on yourself. That's sometimes working on a skill, working on a product. But it is all through work, through effort. I'll tell you something that shifted my life, which is that entrepreneurship is not a game of best man wins. It's a game of last man standing.
And there's a lot of games that are like this. And fundamentally, that's an infinite. game frame versus a finite game frame.
And I will read you the quote that Layla had framed and put in my office. Ask the girl, shoot the shot, launch the business, run the ad, quit the job, take the risk. Because when you're 85 years old and on your deathbed, you're not going to wish you had fewer crazy stories.